Patricia Carlin presents a poem by Carl Phillips

Today I’m posting “Beautiful Dreamer” by Carl Phillips (Barrow Street, Summer 2005).  In the post-Thanksgiving lull there’s space to meditate on the poem, which does its own share of meditating.

Beautiful Dreamer

Here, the Missouri meets the Mississippi.  Two rivers:
one--in these parts, that’s called a marriage.  Sanctuary
makes the birds come closer, maybe -- don’t mistake
that for trust, when it’s only birds, egrets lately, the one
that hasn’t budged all day despite our shouting little
stasis-bird, fly, repeatedly at it; and the rest meanwhile

lifting their ghost majority suddenly up elsewhere, as if
with a shared indifference to chance and its convergences—
so ceremonial, all those wings departing, it can almost
look like privilege . . .

                                        This life, it’s one slow business of
erosion, he said softly.  What a thing to say.  The rivers
run like refrains from one of those hymns that both resist
and envy a bit the recklessness that any good spiritual
will sometimes give in to—Mine hour of bliss cometh
swift upon me, swift and silver, run the rivers, beside
the green ambivalence of trees that, by contrast, keep

going nowhere: cypress trees, the catalpa, its seedpods
hanging like shadow-icicles, they half-decorate, half
litter the light around them with punctuation that can
seem superfluous—and yet shadowless, what would
the light have done, for definition?  What did you think:
suffering

              ends here?  Or should?  Your wishes rise, take
their places in a line long and frangible, the line in turn
shifts like the particular oblivion that doomed cattle
equal—have always equaled.  You’d better wish again.

-- Carl Phillips

I admire the poem’s yoking of cool reflection to passages of extreme lyric beauty.  I’m also attracted to this poem’s discontinuities.  It moves between what is interior (emotion, meditation), and what is outside of human wishes and desires.  In the opening line, for example, there’s a seemingly objective description of a natural feature: “Here, the Missouri meets the Mississippi.”  But then description moves towards something less objective, more emotionally evocative.  “Two rivers: one” suggests human union.  The word “marriage” intensifies the suggestion that we’re dealing with human union, which the words “sanctuary”, “trust”, and “bliss” reinforce.  Yet the landscape and its creatures are also literal.  There are two rivers; and there are egrets, even though they lift up like a “ghost majority.”

The poem develops by way of metaphor; and throughout, it flirts with metaphor’s power to smooth out unbridgeable difference.  But ultimately, it resists that power.  Through the alchemy of metaphor the poem keeps almost making meanings; but it and we are balked in attempts to put the parts together in any finally neat or smooth way.

In the last section wishes rise like the egrets that lifted up in the poem’s opening stanza.  The line they rise in is “long and frangible,” and it “in turn / shifts like the particular oblivion that doomed cattle equal.”  One metaphor slips into another, like the flowing silver river; but all, like the “stasis-bird”, like the “green ambivalence of trees”, ”keep going nowhere.”  The world is not made in the shape of human desire.  “You’d better wish again.”

-- Patricia Carlin